Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Human Rights and Geographic Variability

It
is only right to debate the correct balance between electronic surveillance and
civil rights. Protection of the individual as a cultural principle has not kept
up with individual rights.Pornography,
crime and terror including providing instructions and targets for acts of
terrorism and enticing the vulnerable away from a secure environment can all
now be efficiently communicated through email and the internet.Personal choice is not analogous with our
duty to protect the weak.I am less
concerned with peoples’ freedom to conceal their personal misdemeanors and
indiscretions than with government’s abuse of that personal information.Put more simply, if you have something to be
ashamed of, don’t put it on record, in any form.On the other side of the information paradigm
the proper controls must be put in place to ensure no-one can abuse private
information held in secret.

The
social media are abused in literally millions of postings and comments created
every day.It is as effortless to lie
as it is to tell the truth and because truth and lies are easily manipulated
the electronic media have become no better than vehicles for grotesque and
prejudiced acts of ego gratification.

Basic
human rights can never be geographically variable or historically justified;
not in the name of multiculturalism nor in the name of political correctness.
Rape is the same violation of (usually) women’s bodies in Sweden and Britain
as it is in DR Congo or in Egypt.
The ongoing revolutions in Venezuela
and Cuba do not justify
their specious human rights records nor does it place them above their pet
hate, America.If words such as “integrity” and “ethics”
have any meaning at all they have to be applied in equal measure.

For
example: We should send packing the tens of thousands of Chinese students
enriching our universities, refunding their fees to them in full when we send
them home. Of course the exorbitant fees they pay enrich our universities and
contribute to the bloated salaries of all those lecturers who teach all those
foreign students.

But China enslaves
the masses and is the global sweatshop for the Western worlds’ cheap consumer
products (as well as the source of most of our even cheaper counterfeit
products).Instead of crying crocodile
tears for the poor foreign worker we could solve our unemployment problems but
it would cost us hundreds if not thousands of pounds, dollars, euros or yen
extra to each and every one of us, every year by returning production to
western nations.It would be the ethical
and equitable thing to do.Basic human
rights are not negotiable, nor geographically variable; their omission is not
excused by reference to historical circumstances.Understanding does not discharge
responsibility in the present because of the past.

We
should boycott all goods made in Pakistan and not just for its
sweatshops but also for its inter-generational support for terrorism.Similarly, Qatari oil is not a good reason
for giving Qatar free rein
to oppress its workers of whom at least one per day dies in Qatar building
the infrastructure for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The Islamic Republic of
Mauritania has a population of 3.5 million people.Some 10 to 20 per cent of them are
enslaved.So warm feelings of
self-righteous anger, when directed at a small and economically powerless
nation like Israel are apparently rights of the intellectual coward and the
ethical fascist for whom inconvenient truths are best served up selectively.

We
are living in an age of fear and irrationality where those who create that fear
hold sway over us – see how easy it was for North Korea to stop the nationwide
screening of a movie it did not like (untilSony Corporation was shamed into making a face-saving compromise).The USA is supposed to be the most
powerful, influential nation on the earth.Look at Islamic censorship, its control of the UN.

According
to the United Nations, between 15 March 2011 and October 2014 over 200,000
people were killed in the Syrian Civil War.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) placed the total at
between 200,000 and 282,000 men, women and children murdered up to December
2014.

How
many deaths were there in the Arab-Israeli conflict?Between 1920 and the present, 115,311 people
were killed.So Switzerland
calls a meeting of the Geneva Convention for only the third time in its
history.The UK,
France, Germany and another 123 signatory states to the
Fourth Geneva Convention assembled in order to call out a perpetrator, Israel and it was Israel they called out on the other
two occasions.

Ben-Dror
Yemini expressed this ethical confusion simply in explaining that “anti-Zionism, in essence,
is not a struggle in support of Palestinian rights, but a struggle instead
against Jewish rights.”

Human
Rights and Geographic Variability exist because we live in a political
world.Our politicians and academics,
our journalists and our charity workers, our bureaucrats and our social
activists are human beings – racists, prejudiced and guided by ego.We give them far too much credit for altruism
or for intelligence.They are frightened
of controls that will limit their choices and if it means limiting ours to keep
theirs they will embrace populism and censorship.

The
only thing separating them from us is that we are playing by their rules and
until we stop playing by their rules we can only ever be their victims.